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  1. #11

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    I have updated the notes with more information about Blue Star Memories. I also corrected the imperfect and perfect rewards. More information about Episodes 1 & 2 coming soon.

  2. #12
    Still the Ratimaster Nai_Calus's Avatar
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    Is it just me, or has the first post gotten cut off somehow?

    This has made me recall my huge problem with EpIII, though, specifically Endu's ending... Basically, what's stated to have happened cannot possibly have happened based on the events and dialog presented in Ep2 and even Blue Star Memories. There's a huge contradiction, a couple of them, actually.

    http://objection.mrdictionary.net/go.php?n=2007160 (Directed at ST, not the OP, who is not responsible for EpIII's storyline.)

    So, basically it's stated that Dark Falz kept coming back after being killed the first time and that eventually Rico and Flowen became aware of what was going on and eventually they were able to cause the power involved to overload and this is what created a second explosion and also created Endu and the Great Shadow.

    The problem is this... If this is so, why do we never hear about it? Why, indeed, does all of Episode 2's script basically contradict this? Particularly this terminal message from Seabed...

    "...In this dark abyss..."
    ...
    "...I wait..."
    ...
    "...for the savior of..."
    ...
    "...the red captive child..."

    This establishes two things beyond any doubt: One, that, quite obviously, your character is still the same person in Ep 2 that they were in Ep 1, namely, that you are one of(Well, offline, the *only*) the people who defeated Dark Falz, thus, as implied by seeing Rico's spirit flying away after the battle with Falz and by the ending credits where we see her spirit appearing before Tyrell and Irene(And presumably the scientists hanging around there, but we don't care about them), that your character is the one/one of the people who defeated Dark Falz and thus freed Rico - The savior of the 'red captive child'. Obviously, if Falz kept coming back, there's no reason to refer to your character as such, as you didn't do anything of note.

    The other thing established here is that Episode 2, unsurprisingly, takes place after Episode 1 - Dark Falz has been defeated by this point. Since you are responsible for the defeat, it cannot take place concurrently as you would not be simultaneously a member of the government and the Lab's investigation team. Also, way back at the beginning of Ep 2, Dan had this to say:

    "The Chief is a great leader.
    Research should be directed by the Lab, not the Administration.
    We should have taken charge from the very beginning."

    Implying that it's been a while, that the government investigation had already been conducted and that the Lab staff does not seem to be satisfied with the results.

    So... If Falz isn't dead, and keeps coming back... Why doesn't it come back? Is it taking a while or something? Are we just not hearing about it? If so, why are we still mentioned as the savior of Rico? By Flowen himself, no less, supposedly the one who was alive the whole time as Olga Flow and vaguely aware of what was going on with Falz?

    It doesn't add up, at all. Furthermore... Well, when we destroy Olga Flow, it just dies. No explosion. No mention even in Endu's ending that Flow was repeatedly destroyed and kept coming back. Funny, I still have my Rati. Since I was apparently at part of ground zero, why do I still have it, then? For that matter, unless it's something like what Falz used to make everybody on Pioneer 1 disappear, why aren't I *dead*? (And how come in all this time fighting all this stuff and presumably getting multiple open wounds in three feet of water full of D-cellular sub-lifeform blood, I haven't gotten infected myself? Or maybe I have and it's just not manifested yet in the form of glowing in the dark and looking like a one-person rave, in which case I should be dead no matter what, yes? Unless this is freaking Sailor Moon and I got purified by the Magical Silver Plot Device.) Furthermore, we see the same thing with Flowen as we do with Rico.

    Now, anything 'secret' in the world of Pioneer 2 and Ragol immediately makes it to the ears of you and half the Guild. So why don't you hear about this, if it supposedly happened? Sure, it says the explosion was quickly forgotten, but surely as involved in events as you are, you wouldn't be able to go three feet on Pioneer 2 without hearing all about it.

    Moving to Blue Star Memories... Orland apparently idolizes the 'Four Heroes', the ones who... Defeated Dark Falz.

    Now, information gets around, yeah? So if Falz really kept coming back, there'd be dozens of people who'd fought it, yes? So why 'Four'? The first four? The last four? Either way, why is it even important, in that case? If it's the last, presuming the coming back actually happened, shouldn't the explosion be remembered too? And again, unless it was a super-speshul magickal explosion, shouldn't you be dead? If it's the first, why does it even matter, since you clearly didn't accomplish anything worthwhile and the entire membership of the Hunter's Guild would by now have long-since known this? Orland had to get the idea that the Four Heroes were special from somewhere, yeah? And he heard it from Nef, who does not seem prone to making things up for the hell of it. So either Nef is utterly clueless and pays no attention to anything or... Well, we just contradicted Endu's ending again. If Endu's ending is true, then your character is clearly of no importance in the grand scheme of things, yet Nef has apparently been telling stories - Which do not contradict Ep 1&2 - of your achievements to his pupils.

    It's a nice story, but it just doesn't fit the storyline of Ep1&2, and since Ep3 came later... I have a hard time buying it. Too much retconning. If you have to re-write the past to make your present work, you need to re-think the present you're trying to present. It would be fine for a fanfic, since those exist to explore unexplored paths and 'what-ifs'. If someone wrote Endu's story as a fanfic, I wouldn't buy a word of it, but I'd accept it as an interesting 'what if *this* happened...?' scenario. As part of an official, supposedly canon game... It's just sloppy, really.

    If someone wants to explain to me how it all makes perfect sense and doesn't contradict a thing and that I'm just too stupid to get it, please feel free to explain it to me, because it's been bugging me since... Well, since Ep3 came out several years ago. >_>; (I know, I know, it's ST, lovers of not explaining things in detail or indeed at all, but well...)

    PSUJP: Nai Calus, M. B. 176 FI 20 | Elly, F. N. 42 FT 5 Requiescat in pace.

  3. #13

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    .....wow thats alot of info to read...

  4. #14
    PSO Assassin
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    hey

    this is a very interesting topic, especially since i started playing through the story-mode once more recently (well, i would play online, if it worked better on private server >_>)

    when i came over that "second explosion" thing during the hunters-story, i thought it might be connected to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfF-mqLNnok

    i have never played Blue Burst myself, and i'm not aware of episode 4's story, but as far as i know it takes place short after episode 2, so this explosion here can not have happened long after the explosion when Pioneer 2 arrived at ragol..

    do you think it's possible that this is meant with that second explosion? i mean it's the only explosion which is mentioned in PSO's storyline after the beginning of episode 1...
    my main-chars:
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  5. #15

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    The whole Endu/RRR/Flowen thing is an attempt to legitimize the online portion of the game. Think about it. When you play the offline/story, you (and your party of four) find messages by Red Ring Rico and kill Dark Falz dead. DF doesn't come back to life, Colin Tyrell grieves, etc. Later you check out Gal Da Val Island and kill Olga Flow dead, who had been expecting you since you released Red Ring Rico's spirit. The game ends, stuff happens, EP4 and 3 transpire.

    At the same time, there's the online game. No matter how many times you do Ruins runs, you'll find Dark Falz at the end and kill it dead. Every time you and your random gang of lobby-goers visit the Test Subject Disposal Area, you'll find Olga Flow there. You're not the only person to find them, either: pretty much every other Hunter has seen and fought Dark Falz and Olga Flow at least once. While the mechanical reason behind this is because Sonic Team programmed it this way, they felt the need to justify this happening through fruity storyline crap.

    Basically you need to accept that both the online and offline storylines are happening at the same time. Even though the two plots totally contradict each other, they both exist in EP3.

  6. #16
    Still the Ratimaster Nai_Calus's Avatar
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    Actually, it's not that way at all, PSO is instanced. You can fight Dark Falz or Olga flow every time you start an Ep 1 or Ep 2 game, but you can only fight them once. Indeed, it's online that you can actually go back to the battlefield to see Rico and Flowen's spirits. You can do a Forest to Falz and then do TTF afterwards to do it again, but TTF is a VR mission. Not a real Falz. Same with Respective Tomorrow.

    So my problem with it remains unsolved. :-/

    PSUJP: Nai Calus, M. B. 176 FI 20 | Elly, F. N. 42 FT 5 Requiescat in pace.

  7. #17
    Skilled Fighter DezoPenguin's Avatar
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    Okay, then, consider this: While you can only fight Falz/Olga once per game, you can certainly kill them over and over again. Heck, pretty much everyone's killed 'em four times (Normal-Hard-Very Hard-Ultimate). Killed him twice myself on Sunday (yes, I still play PSO now and again ^_^ ).

    So rather than being ST's cheesy way of justifying the offline game, it's ST's cheesy way of acknowledging the player's typical MMORPG experience of killing the same boss over and over again (not unlike how that one scientist guy says many more De Rol Les must exist after you clear the Cave). So since obviously merely applying physical damage and resolving the storyline over and over doesn't deal with Falzie and Olga on a long-term basis, Rico and Flowen's spirits hooked up and finished the things off to move the plot along.

    Now, it might also be mentioned that since none of this got mentioned during Episode 4 to my knowledge, it all happened after Episode 4. And you, your character never experienced any of that because your character's experiences are what Flowen and Rico were trying to fix by doing what they did.

    Of course, it's all mind-numbingly stupid, but it's not, to my awareness, retconning per se.

    (As for "The Four Heroes," since Blue Star Memories takes place waaaaay after PSO I,II, and IV, one could hypothesize that "The Four Heroes" were the four who were actually present during the last fight with Falz. My favorite interpretation was that your character actually died in that battle and during Blue Star Memories you were actually playing a clone of your dead self. Which makes me want to give Relmitos a smack upside the head in Ep. III, but that's a different story.)

    Such, Ian, is the crap that happens when one tries to justify a story continuity in an MMORPG.


  8. #18

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    The second explosion is almost certainly when Rico and Flowen destroyed themselves and created Endu. This act wiped out the D-Cells on Ragol, which is why some people lost their MAGs. MAGs are a core of D-Cells surrounded by a case. This is why they react so much when items are fed to them. Chances are that hunters that were on Ragol at the time of the explosion likely lost their MAGs. MAGs that were on Pioneer 2 at the time were probably safe.

    Now for Dark Falz and Olga. This is hard to explain, but Dark Falz making itself stronger each time it was defeated might be reflective of the difficulty levels. Yous tart out on Normal, and work your way to Ultimate. Falz, as well as all the other enemies, are stronger each time. This does seem to be a bit of a plot hole as its not quite clear exactly how this all fits in. I've thought about it for a long time and I don't have a defenite and conclusive answer like I do for pretty much everything else in Episode 3. This is my best theory:

    Dark Falz was defeated by the 4 heroes. Rico's mind was set free, which allowed her and Flowen to one day generate that second explosion which wiped out the D-Cells.

    I'm still pondering this, as admittedly it doesns't quite add up right.

    <font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Cranberry on 2007-09-12 21:07 ]</font>

  9. #19
    Katz Nidramag's Avatar
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    Falz be dead. You be the hero. SEGA thinks we're stupid and wouldn't look for great insight into the best fucking game ever. Its full of holes, A wizard did it. We have to assume something happened that falz was gone, that you're character was either immune or somehow not infected. I'm buying episode 3 and going through it to see if I can try to catch anything and come up with a grandiose plot scheme.


    Cran that was an amazing write x_x thanks for writing it all out

    I r i s - 13X -VaDewearl (3X)

  10. #20

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    Thanks for this compilation of notes. I've always liked EP3's story line even with any contradictions it may have in timeline. The characters are just so much more interesting then what I've seen so far in PSU. Their all very likeable, like Break, the idealist turned rogue against the government that made OPSS possible, playing Blue Star Memories when Break and Orlandu were just seeing Hunters as a way to help others and be heroes, and then it turns out Hunters are just tools used by a government like that...Or how Ino'lis is so ditzy, but later on has a scary obsessive streak that gets Kranz killed, they develop her from being so fake to someone of some drastic emotional flaws. The cloning of Kranz also raised the morality of cloning and the question of the value of life that can be brought back this way, it was a nice touch. The mystery of Endu and how Relmitos is trying to figure out who/what he is, and his similarity to Flowen is just great.

    Also, the note you had on Shino from the 'Seek My Master' quest bring back memories, that was quite sad, she was so loyal to Zoke. OPSS was a terrible thing to happen to CASTs/humanoids, in the current game PSU, its interesting to see that they are the military, and have basic rights...then they also talk about the cast supremacy, it would be 'just desserts' for the OPSS incident.

    It seems the tone for EP 3 was darker and had so many characters to look into and like. I wish this level of depth was available in the current bunch of characters in PSU, however I don't see it. It'd be great to see an EP3 derived quest/event, it will never happen though, the chars and game isn't as popular. =/

    Again, thanks for this, reminded me of how much fun I had following the EP3 story arcs and its great characters.

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